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Review: Tormentor X Punisher – Screaming goregasm

Editor’s Note: Due to the nature of this game, there’s a lot of profanity in this review – though you should have guessed that from the byline. Read on at your own risk.

A raging female space marine with a bad temper and even less of a penchant for eloquence, the newest indie hotness Tormentor X Punisher starts off with a primal scream of “Let’s fucking do this!” right before it kicks in your teeth. In fact, if there’s anything Tormentor X Punisher does, it’s continually scream. Not only does our heroine shout profanity often, but the game drips (literally) with a comic book meets 16-bit art style that runs faster than you back to your mom after this game puts a demonic boot in your ass.

To best describe Tormentor X Punisher, it’s basically Smash TV meets The Binding of Isaac in Hell. Our lovely space marine is dropped into an arena after two evil hands rip the screen open in a clear nod to both Goatse, and the ass ripping that you’re about to receive, and very quickly Tormentor X Punisher throws your balls to the wall.

Every enemy in Tormentor X Punisher can be killed with a single shot (and of course, so can you.) The trick isn’t doing the damage, the trick is figuring out how to deliver these death blows and keeping your lilly ass alive to do it. As the enemies die, they learn from your playstyle. This means if you’re constantly running circles around the arena trying to gather up massive mobs for big combos, eventually the game will send one off enemies to flank you and check your shit in. What this also means is that there are a plethora of different ways to dispatch enemies, and while you don’t get more than your default machine gun and shotgun, you will unlock power-ups and abilities by using your environment to creatively dispatch the hordes of demons.

Is there a ton of stuff coming at you and you’re backed into a corner? Turn around and bounce a shotgun blast off the wall, smashing everything that’s chasing you and clearing a space for you to keep on moving. Facing off with a shielded enemy? Bounce some shots off their shield and lay waste to any of his cronies who might dare stand too close. You’ll eventually gain short term powers like flaming shots or chained lightning arc attacks, but it’s all random and that’s what makes the replay value for TxP so high.

You’ll eventually gain short term powers like flaming shots or chained lightning arc attacks, but it’s all random and that’s what makes the replay value for TxP so high. You quite literally never know what will happen, or what will spawn. You might jump into a round and the first boss that spawns is the horrible pain in the ass Golem which throws giant bricks at you and drops bricks from the ceiling which could smash you but also hinder your shots until you’ve damaged them enough to break them out of your way. If you survive, a few moments later another boss spawns and it’ll probably be yet another pain in the ass like the guy who throws big ass buzz saws all over the place. Each boss has a different set of strengths and you’ll have to learn their attack patterns and look for weaknesses in order to kill them – a feat that is far from simple.

Each boss has a different set of strengths and you’ll have to learn their attack patterns and look for weaknesses in order to kill them – a feat that is far from simple.

Tormentor X Punisher also has a soundtrack featuring a peculiar mashup of tracks that sound somewhere between Deadmau5’s FML and b-sides that you’d likely find from any Frontline Assembly album. Tormentor X Punisher’s background music keeps the bass pumping through your head as the blood rushes to your fingers. Shredding your enemies with your shotgun and machine gun feels oh so satisfying when the guitars kick in, and among the sea of profanity, you’ll find what might be the best possible stress reliever you’ll play for less than five minutes per run.

The best part about Tormentor X Punisher is that bite-sized gaming feeling. You can jump in and play a few rounds which will probably take you less than five minutes and feel completely satisfied or you might spend 45 minutes raging at your controller because the demon that taunts you after you die is an asshole. However you wanna look at it, Tormentor X Punisher is simple but breathes new life into a familiar space.

If the addictive gameplay isn’t enough to keep you coming back for yet another ass-kicking, there’s a global leaderboard to display your score skills, and if you play your cards just right you’ll get a random demon in the game named after you which is even more awesome to see a random person streaming TxP and finding out that you’re the one who dealt their death blow. That’s a cool feature and a great way to get people talking among the streaming community.

If there were anything to complain about with Tormentor X Punisher, it would be the amount of content. There’s really only one mode of play, though you can play co-op locally with a friend. It would be nice to see online play or more game mode options – such as being able to control a boss and drop into a random game being played in real time. While the game moves extremely fast, at times the shaking screen effect can start to wear on the eyes – which might cause people who have motion sickness issues to feel sick during extended play. A profanity filter would also be welcome, as you can turn the sound off to avoid the screams, but you can’t avoid the word bubbles that pop up and so much language might turn off younger or religious players. You can change the

While the game moves extremely fast, at times the shaking screen effect can start to wear on the eyes – which might cause people who have motion sickness issues to feel sick during extended play. A profanity filter would also be welcome, as you can turn the sound off to avoid the screams, but you can’t avoid the word bubbles that pop up and such language might turn off younger or religious players. You can change the in-game language to help a little bit, but the words that burst up when you attack are always in English and can’t be unseen.

Though I’d suspect if you’ve gotten this far in the review, you’re not going to be all that bothered about it – but it’s worth a last-minute mention is a lot of fun, and an indie game I could see myself buying on multiple systems (Looking at you, Switch.)